[URL=http://gratz.thecomicseries.com/comics/pl/882701] [IMG]http://gratz.thecomicseries.com/images/comics/145/1eafb169d67fcd3bcda1279ee7459ed0945085862.jpg[/IMG] [/URL]
[URL=http://gratz.thecomicseries.com/comics/pl/882701]It's all in the foot work[/URL]

Comments:

Veja knew exactly what he was doing: he kept the sword in the sheath to bring the maximum weight/force to her knees. Unless you're superhuman (or have control of your Archon powers), you get hit there you're going down. Arua's expression in Panel 5 tells the whole story.

Now, he has to be expecting Witch to try and shoot HIM at this point, so going to be interesting to see his plan to avoid that.

Predictable is subjective. I had a strong feeling about what was going to happen because I've developed a way of thinking about these two characters. I also was thinking in terms of standard psychological profiling: if a person's mind is under the control of someone else, they are not going to be capable of reacting the same way as if they were in control. The controller's thoughts and will are going to override theirs. In the case of Arua, you had already shown that she was unable to control her Archon powers; which is completely reasonable because The Light responds to ARUA's will, not the witch's. Veja has been adventuring with Arua enough at this point that he has a feel for how she fights; also, a lifetime spent in the streets has equipped him with enough dirty fighting skills to counter someone without that experience. Put all of that together and I had the feeling Arua was not going to be able to put up her strongest fight, and that Veja was going to use his experience to try and disable her without seriously injuring her.

ALRIGHT! Time to go over the scoring results for GRATZ during the month of February. There's a surprise, and some things I found surprising.

To recap: For January GRATZ finished the month at #538 on Top Web Comics, with a total of 101 votes.

For February, as of Wednesday, 2/28 at 11:20 pm EST, GRATZ achieved another all-time high ranking of #504 with a total of 103 votes. In only 28 days the comic had 2 more total votes than in 31 days of January. New records for the comic. Another great job of voting everyone.

However....

Because I was tracking the votes on a daily basis I noticed a couple of interesting, and sad things. Firstly, the comic *finished* at #504, but it actually was ranking higher for a short period of time during the middle of the month. In fact, on Friday, 2/16 GRATZ topped out at #484, with 64 votes, and it started edging higher up through the end of the month. This was also the point where I began noticing that where each days voting averaged 4 votes, on the weekends that dropped to 2 votes a day. Saw it the weekend of 2/9 and again weekend of 2/24. Yes, I saw a drop-off again this past weekend.

But the big surprise was the vote count for Tuesday 2/13: the count jumped "7" votes 2/12. That the biggest single day vote since I've been tracking. Where did those additional votes come from? That I can't know. But, had GRATZ been averaging that 7 votes each day instead of 3-4, it would have ended the month with around 196 total, which would have landed the comic at #342 on the list.

With the vote count already higher for February, I'm going to be particularly interested in what we can do with a 31 day month.